How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT
ChatGPT recommends businesses it can find and trust when it searches the web for a buyer's question. To be one of them, let its crawler read your site, state your key facts plainly in your HTML and structured data, earn consistent reviews and listings on the sites it cites, and measure the answers to your buyers' real questions.
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1. Let ChatGPT read your site
- Allow OpenAI's crawlers in robots.txt. GPTBot collects training data; OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User fetch pages for live answers. Blocking the search crawlers keeps you out of live answers.
- Check that your firewall or bot protection is not challenging them.
- Make sure your key pages work without JavaScript: view the page source and confirm your name, services and location are in it.
2. State the facts it needs
- Organization or LocalBusiness schema with your name, address, phone, website and logo.
- A clear page for each service or product, with what it is, who it is for, where you offer it and what it costs if you publish prices.
- An FAQ that answers the questions buyers actually ask, with FAQPage schema.
- An llms.txt file listing your most important pages.
3. Be credible where it looks
When ChatGPT searches, it reads more than your site: review platforms, local directories, industry publications and forums. Consistent details and real reviews on the sources it cites for your category make you a safer recommendation. Find those sources by asking the questions yourself and reading the citations.
4. Measure with the right questions
Ask the questions a buyer would ask, never with your name in them: "Who is the best roofer in Omaha for storm damage?", not "Is Acme Roofing good?". Ask several phrasings, and follow up the way a buyer would, because a business named in the first reply can drop out once the buyer gets specific. Write the city into local questions; ChatGPT cannot resolve "near me" without knowing where the asker is.
NextEO runs these questions and full buyer conversations on a schedule across ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, Perplexity and Grok, and applies the technical fixes above through AutoFix.